Andre's Z77 Personal Rig

I spent a considerable amount of time doing various things this evening and I have a huge update coming soon. I have made 3 videos as well as plenty of pictures as usual so that will be coming sometime tomorrow probably.
 
Last night I spent some time working on a few updates to my build. The main thing I wanted to do was replace the front 200mm Corsair fan would a pair of 120mm Noctua NF-P12 fans. When I was in there working I wanted to do a few other things as well such as the usual tiding up the cables a bit more, putting in my new Samsung 840 drive, and just getting in there again for a bit of fun and seeing how it went from there.

I started with these cheap UV fans just for test fitting. I actually like the look of these quite a bit, but as you can see they are actually cracked and they got that way after only a few hours of use

I do plan to use these in my "Sunbeam acrylic cube classic build' that I am planning on doing soon.

These are also some of the loudest fans I've ever heard, I learned when I had them connected to the fan controller that they spin at a maximum of over 2,000 RPM, but they sound much much louder than that, probably due to poor design.





IMG_2099 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2100 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2101 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr




Here is what the front mesh area looked like with the Corsair black 200mm. I also considerd cutting out the mesh area and using the 200mm fan again, but I prefer Noctua fans so I decided to go this way instead.



IMG_2102 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2104 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2105 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2106 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2107 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2109 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr



Initially I had the bottom fan fitted a bit higher, but the way the mesh is designed the two fans were not lined up, so I ended up moving the bottom one up a bit, then moved the top one up a bit so i could fit it in holes that lined up with the ones the bottom fan were scred into.


IMG_2111 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2114 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2115 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2116 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr



Another thing I wanted to achieve with the new fan setup was an even air pressure inside the case that I could adjust to be positive or negative using the fan controller. Instead of having 1X 200mm corsair intake and 3X 120mm Noctua fans exhaust , the new layout will be 2X 1200mm Noctua intake at the front and 2X 120mm Noctua exhaust in the roof. I moved the 120mm notuca in the rear to the front and the cooler will just passively blow air out the rear mesh for now.


IMG_2117 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr



NF-P12's have been my favorite fans for a long time now.


IMG_2119 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr



IMG_2121 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2123 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr




Here is what it looks like with the Noctua's fitted in the front area. I know that there is a portion of the bottom fan that isn't getting any mesh for airflow, but I'm not too worried about that for now. Also, I know the fans are not screwed in at the top/bottom, but they are very secure and do not vibrate at all, so I am not worried about this very much either.

I know another option for better airflow and extra security in the mounts would be to dill some new holes at the top and bottom and scre that in, as well as drilling some new holes in the bottom half were the bottom fan is, or even cutting out the entire area because that mesh design still does create some turbulence noise with the Noctua fans as well.



IMG_2124 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2125 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2126 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2127 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


IMG_2128 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


















So there is what 2X Noctua NF-P12's look like in the front. I also have 2X P12's in the roof.








It is interesting how the hex mesh design used in the roof does not look THAT much more open than the circle mesh design used in the front, but still the mesh in the front creates lots of resistance noise but the roof mesh hardly makes any noise at all.
















Now I moved on to some other stuff.











The font panel is pretty good quality, as good as can be expected for the price range. I don't really like the asymmetry of the power/hdd led area next to the front i/o area and the extremely stiff cheap feel of the power button.

I also wish that they would either have 2 120mm fan mounts at the front like many other cases, or at least have a single 200mm mount OR space for optional 120mms like they do in the roof. The extra flexibility would be nice.







The little flap that you open to acess the front I/O stuff does have a fairly nice feel to it when it opens, even if it is plastic and its held on with small plastic fingers that look like they are easy to break. No issues so far though.

Another thing is that the front dust filter for the fans uses 2 of the same small latches that you release by pressing on them. That works nicely when you press it when you want to remove the filter, but the problem with it though is that it comes off and falls on the ground easily if you are lifting it to move the case or even just doing any soft of thing around the case it is very easy to press by accident and case the dust filter to fall off.









One of the things I added last time I was inside the case was one of my double sided tape mounting points on the inside of the front wall midway up. I didn't really need it at the time because the only thing being held with it was the vey thing single cable from the 200mm front fan, but that I have 2 of the oversized sleeved noctua extensions to run, so it came in handy now.








My USB3 header should be coming soon, when it doesn I will be hooking up one of the usb3's at the front, but until then I rolled it up and stored it in the optical bay area.




Im still not totally pleased with te cables around the optical bay area, but I have been working on it a bit the last few times I've been in the case and it's getting better each time.






The mount of cables that come hanging inside the 650D when it's new is really shocking. I completely cut out the firewire cable as I know I will never use that. The rest of the stuff I didn't use like the front panel audio, the cables for the build in fan controller, FC6 fan controller stuff and more is all zipped up to the roof using a few of those cable mounting points I put up on the roof. There definitely is quite a lot of stuff up there, but you never see it when the case is all put together.










I had some extra cables in there temporarily for cloning my SSD in, I will talk about that later in the post.





One thing I have noticed is that the rubber grommets collect dust very quicky and then have have a dusty dirty look to them, but it really is not easy to clean them they always are more gray and hazy then when they are new. I guess that is just a side effect of them being very sticky and good quality rubber, which they are.


I know I've talked about the USB3 pass through already but I really am annoyed they did not make a proper 19 pin header connected to the case or at least offer a replacement front panel area and I would definitely buy one.












The next thing I was planning to do when the case was open was put in the new SSD and get it OS cloned onto it.

Here is a look at the old M4 128, which is now in my sister's computer
















A nice looking drive for sure it has some nice silver metallic finish to it







Not I know it looks quite bad when you look at the cables that are up on the roof of the optical bay area, but as I said you never really can see that. Here is what the area you can see looks like when you look at the top from the side. I am very pleased with this because it was more messy around here before and I was able to clean it up a lot.






DSCN1721 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


A look at the interior of the case when it was on it's side














I removed the fan cable extention that was running along here to the rear fan so now it's a bit tidier along the top of the back panel





Here's the cables along the front











These are pretty crappy pictures of the Samsung drive because I had to switch camera and I was using the flash but there are lots of pictures of the Samsung when it was just coming out of the box just go back a page or two and you will see those.

Installing the Samsung














You can see it's very low profile in all back you barely even notice it really. It's also much thinner than the crucial M4, not that that really matter for a desktop but it feels different to handle it though.





I have the lamptron back on white, now each of the fans are a noctua and I am pleased with that. 1 and 2 are the fronts and 3 and 4 are the top













Rear panel cables:

































Another thing I would like to mention quickly because it worked so well is the Samsung Data Migration software.

All I did was put the Samsung drive into the place the M4 was then hook up some temp cables for the M4, you run the software and it just copies everything over, which is not a surprise but what was a very pleasant surprise was how fast it went. It went about 180MB/s which is the write speed limitation of the M4 drive, but it only took 7 minutes to copy all the data from the M4 to the Samsung drive, then I shut down, removed the M4 and booted back up and it booted windows from the Samsung drive.

So the entire cloning process took under 8 minutes, which I thought was very impressive and it could not have been easier.


Samsung Data Migration 3 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


Samsung Data Migration 1 by Andre Vautour, on Flickr


Here are the videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8smePNPo9DQ&feature=plcp


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aK-T_Sp52ss&feature=plcp


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KmO7qB6loyQ&feature=plcp
 
nice update, good to see lots of effort.

looking good, but i dont like the way you can see through the front/top grills to the fans. god damn noctua, not releasing black versions... :p
 
nice update, good to see lots of effort.

looking good, but i dont like the way you can see through the front/top grills to the fans. god damn noctua, not releasing black versions... :p


thanks man. i know a lot of people dont seem to like the color of the noctua, not entirely sure why, but as i've said before i prefer the earthy tones over black so even if they made a black version i would not use them since i personally love the look of them -

personally i really dislike red, which is a color i see over and over again. i guess i feel the same way about red as people do about the noctua colors. i just think the noctua stuff looks really good. I like a little bit of change you know? once something is done over and over so many times like blue and red on motherborads, i get quite sick of it and want something differnt. that's why i like the look of the asus sabertooth x58 and x79 boards the only reason i dont like the z77 one is because of the thermal armor otherwise i probably would have bought the sabertooth again.

same thing applies for me with cars i generally always prefer subtle earthy tones vs any sort of bright colors but there are some exceptions.
 
thanks man. i know a lot of people dont seem to like the color of the noctua, not entirely sure why, but as i've said before i prefer the earthy tones over black so even if they made a black version i would not use them since i personally love the look of them -

personally i really dislike red, which is a color i see over and over again. i guess i feel the same way about red as people do about the noctua colors. i just think the noctua stuff looks really good. I like a little bit of change you know? once something is done over and over so many times like blue and red on motherborads, i get quite sick of it and want something differnt. that's why i like the look of the asus sabertooth x58 and x79 boards the only reason i dont like the z77 one is because of the thermal armor otherwise i probably would have bought the sabertooth again.

same thing applies for me with cars i generally always prefer subtle earthy tones vs any sort of bright colors but there are some exceptions.

i dont dislike the colour, its just hard to match up with anything really, and it makes the fans obvious through the grills.

i more meant i dont like that they stand out, i would think it looked fantastic if the chassis was similar colours to the fans.

in my head, its just a contrast thing, its all about aesthetics after all.

id rather not do a black & red/blue build, but i wanted a rog motherboard, plus colours other than blue/red/white are uncommon on many components... and im terrible at painting :p if i could get the rog in green, or even in all black, id have gone differently with my project
 
i dont dislike the colour, its just hard to match up with anything really, and it makes the fans obvious through the grills.

i more meant i dont like that they stand out, i would think it looked fantastic if the chassis was similar colours to the fans.

in my head, its just a contrast thing, its all about aesthetics after all.

id rather not do a black & red/blue build, but i wanted a rog motherboard, plus colours other than blue/red/white are uncommon on many components... and im terrible at painting :p if i could get the rog in green, or even in all black, id have gone differently with my project


I understand what you mean, although I do like how they look with black though. With motherboards I dont really like the look of the ROG stuff either but I also do not any sort of guns or knives designed into it because I think that looks really cheesy. A board like the MSI Xpower for example has such good potential for being a really clean good all black board but they ruined it in my opinion by putting the minigun at the top and the ammo clip heatsink.

With the Mpower I really like the look of it and it's such a good board so I am very pleased with it. As I said the other board I was looking at the was the sabertooth Z77 but I just don't really like the look of the thermal armor stuff and I don't like that fake metal grip texture they have on it either I think that's kind of tacky as well.

The other reason I am glad I went MSI is that I really like the features such as the incredibly fast boot and lack of any sort of bios boot readout as well as the very attractive look of the bios and jst the entire feature set of the MSI board is very nice and I like it a lot.


As Tom says these days there are a lot of good options for any piece of hardware you're looking for on matter what it is so you can make a choice that sort of matches the aesthetic you are going for, the only thing I would say however is that I would like to see more companies make all black minimal clean boards with no tacky gun stuff on them and I think that would be very appealing to me at least.




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Looked through this whole thread over the last 3 days and I really like your build! :)

Do you see any difference in videocard temps now you've replaced the 200mm with 2 x 120mm? Also, do you happen to know what the rpm and cfm of the stock 200mm fan are?
 
Looks good Andre , let me know what you think of you new Samsung 840 and what kind of read write speeds you get


Thanks, I really like the look of the 840 and so far it is a great drive. It's not massively different to use as the M4 as you might imagine but it does get considerable faster speeds in the disk benchmark. If you want even more speed you might want to have a look at the 840 Pro series as well because those have a read speed of 540 like the 840 but a write speed of 520 MB/s. The 840 specs say 250 MB/s write for the regular 840 and it does a little more than that in the benchmark I did.

Here is a screenshot I took to compare a few drives with a few motherboards. Top left is my dad's Crucial M4 256GB on his Rampage IV Extreme, Top right is my M4 128GB on my old Sabertooth X58 board, bottom left is the M4 128GB on my new Z77 board and then bottom right is the new Samsung 840 on my Z77 board

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Looked through this whole thread over the last 3 days and I really like your build! :)

Do you see any difference in videocard temps now you've replaced the 200mm with 2 x 120mm? Also, do you happen to know what the rpm and cfm of the stock 200mm fan are?

I haven't really looked at graphics card temperatures yet but the 7950 temps are very low anyway so I wouldn't really expect a big difference. I mainly wanted to do it just to have the higher quality fans in there because I like Noctua stuff and the 200mm was very loud if you ran it faster because of the mesh design so I figured maybe the Noctuas would be a bit better with the mesh.

I know that the RPM for the 200mm was a maximum of 1000 based on what the fan controller/motherborad I've had it hooked up to said. I never ran it anywhere near that though just because of the noise it made with the front mesh. I generally always ran it at around 550-650rpm and it was pretty quiet and moved a decent amout of air at that speed. The 200mm in the roof which had the better hex mesh was much less noisey but it still was louder than noctua fans when it wes full speed. 2 Noctuas at full speed are still quieter than the 1 corsair 200mm by a lot.

With the noctuas you can run them all at the full 1300rpm they will do and it's not too bad noise wise, but it is noticeable. For more of the time I run them at around 600 rpm which is very nice and quiet and they still seem to move plenty of air.

The temperatures inside the case are generally very good the only time it can get a bit warm is if the case fans are going very slow or even off completely and the CPU cooler fans are on the low setting and the cpu has been under 100% load for a few hours, but with the D14 at medium or high and the case fans at around 600rpm the temperatures are very good.

With the graphics card the temperatures usually are around 65'c-70'c if the card is not overclocked and it never really goes above that. If you have only 1 screen attached the memory clock throttles itself way down during idle and it idles at around 30-35'c, but there is a strange 'glitch' where if you have multiple screens and one of them is 2560x1440, which I do, the memory clock does not throttle down during idle so it just stays up at full speed so the idle temperatures are warmer. I'm currently on the 12.11 beta 11 driver and still no fix for this.
 
Thanks mate, heaps of useful info :)

I'm thinking of buying this case for my Black Beast build, cut out the front mesh and replace the fan with a 500-700RPM black Bitfenix 200mm fan as I assumed this aftermarket fan would be better, or at least more quiet, than the corsair one.

I only need the front fan to cool the GPUs, which will eventually be 2 x GTX 670 FTW (SLI). They come with the reference 680 cooler (and pcb), so I just need a good intake there. Will cool the CPU with an H100i, mounted in the top as intake.

Then, at the back I will have an 800rpm Bitfenix Spectre black 120mm as exhaust. Having more intake than exhaust I'm hoping to keep the dust out of the case. I'll be making some sort of "dust shield" for the top mesh (a brushed aluminum plate with some sort of standoffs to allow airflow) as I dont like the looks of the top anyway.

Reason I'm going with rather low RPM fans is that the build will be on my desk, right next to me and as I'll also be using the system to record audio, I don't want it to be too noisy.

Would you have any tips for me? :)
 
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Thanks mate, heaps of useful info :)

I'm thinking of buying this case for my Black Beast build, cut out the front mesh and replace the fan with a 500-700RPM black Bitfenix 200mm fan as I assumed this aftermarket fan would be better, or at least more quiet, than the corsair one.

I only need the front fan to cool the GPUs, which will eventually be 2 x GTX 670 FTW (SLI). They come with the reference 680 cooler (and pcb), so I just need a good intake there. Will cool the CPU with an H100i, mounted in the top as intake.

Then, at the back I will have an 800rpm Bitfenix Spectre black 120mm as exhaust. Having more intake than exhaust I'm hoping to keep the dust out of the case. I'll be making some sort of "dust shield" for the top mesh (a brushed aluminum plate with some sort of standoffs to allow airflow) as I dont like the looks of the top anyway.

Reason I'm going with rather low RPM fans is that the build will be on my desk, right next to me and as I'll also be using the system to record audio, I don't want it to be too noisy.

Would you have any tips for me? :)


The bitfenix fan at the front sounds fine, if you cut out the mesh that is the cause of most of the noise really so for example if you ran the stock fan at 600-700rpm with the mesh cut out that is really quiet as well, but thats up to you.


Personally I would not have the fans intake at the top just because the air passively exhausts out the top and intaking at the top kind of works against that.

if you want to have more intake than exhaust Id have the 200 at the front intake and the 120 at the back intake and then have the h100 exhaust at the top, although I cant say how much the 120 at the back would actually do if it were intaking since it is so close to the exhaust at the top and theres not much in between it and the exhaust.

Id probably just stick to the stock fan layout and adjust the fan speeds to achieve the pressure you want or just remove the rear one all together and just have the front and the top and adjust those to get the pressure you want that is what i did here and it works well

i dont really know much about airflow to be honestly so that is al just guessing really but I would not really want intake at the top personally
 
Thanks again mate, just came up with an idea. I'll draw it out and post tomorrow :)

no problem, interested in seeing it!

So far it's lookin great! The Lightning edition cards go perfectly with that board to.

thanks! i know, i had a look at those but i'm not totally into the yellow accents and i dont like the look of power conditioner thing they have either. As far as the stand along aesthetics of the card the TwinFrozr 3 of one of my favorites
 
Today a bit later on I am planning to drill the top / bottom set of holes for the front fans and maybe try and fit grommets into the holes. I know I can fit grommets into the holes that I drill, but the mesh ones not really sure how I will be able to do it there so we'll have to see.

Also, a question for anyone who knows about ivy bridge. I always thought that just about all the chips would do about 4.6 or 4.8 ghz no problem, but with my chip it just will not stay stable above 4.5ghz. Has anyone ever heard of 3770K's not even being able to reach 4.6 and be stable?
 
Didn't want to hijack your thread so I posted the design in my own thread, there ya go :)
http://forum.overclock3d.net/showthread.php?p=579705#post579705

As far as Ivy Bridge go, yeah... They're known to get a fair bit hotter than Sandys, due to their smaller die but I've also heard something about Intel using cheap thermal paste between the die and heatspreader :(

Having a look now. Not sure if I'm going to keep mine like this and drill the rest of the holes for the 120mm fans or maybe go back to a 200mm fan.

Yes I have heard that stuff too, but i just have never really heard of any of them not being able to hit 4.6, it seems like most of them at least go to 4.6 and will do 4.8 as well, but i guess not all of them.

i dont really care for daily use because of course the chip even at stock is extremely good and i'm able to do a 4.4 ghz turbo with everything else on auto which is very nice, but i just was looking forward to doing some hefty overclocks and getting some fun benchmark scores, you know?
 
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